Nicholas Best is a British author of Anglo-Irish origin. He grew up in Kenya and was educated there, at King's School, Canterbury and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served with the Grenadier Guards in Windsor and Belize and worked in London as a journalist before becoming a full time author. He lives now in Cambridge.

His early books include Happy Valley: The story of the English in Kenya, and Where were you at Waterloo?, a satirical novel of army life. His second novel, Tennis and the Masai , was later serialised on BBC Radio 4. It told the story of a Kenya prep school similar to Best's own , where the cricket score arrived by carrier pigeon and runaway boys were hunted down with spearmen and tracker dogs.

Best's most recent book is The Greatest Day in History, a widely acclaimed account of the 1918 Armistice. In 2010, he was long-listed for the Sunday Times short story award with The Souvenir, a satirical account of American furniture salesmen scouring the Amazon for shrunken heads.